Theological debate about the origin of evil derives from the quest after God’s goodness and justice. This problem can be constructively discussed only within the framework of a universe that has been created good, and within a corresponding anthropology. Anselm’s enquiry proceeds much along these tracks, and is based on the premises of the Platonic‐Augustinian view of evil as the privation of good, yet it concludes with a reference to the domain of the irrational and contradiction in which such a (...) discussion must necessarily harbour. The strength and uniqueness of his approach lies in his well defined hermeneutical and epistemological framework: his definition of theology as fides quaerens intellectum on the one hand, and his concept of ordo et pulchritudo universitatis on the other.The aim of this article is to discuss Anselm’s answer to the origin of evil in a wider context of his definitions of freedom and theology, trying to consider the issue, as Anselm does, from the point of view of the doctrine of Creation by the Word. His argument will be considered from the standpoint of Systematic Theology, which will enable us to contrast it with the thought of modern thinkers. Therefore the goal of this writing is not primarily to show how unique Anselm’s solution is in the history of dogma, but rather to highlight the uniqueness of the manner of his elaboration of this problem within his own theological framework. (shrink)

This book contributes to two debates and it does so by bringing them together. The first is a debate in metaethics concerning normative reasons, the considerations that serve to justify a person’s actions and attitudes. The second is a debate in epistemology concerning the norms for belief, the standards that govern a person’s beliefs and by reference to which they are assessed. The book starts by developing and defending a new theory of reasons for action, that is, of practical reasons. (...) The theory belongs to a family that analyses reasons by appeal to the normative notion of rightness (fittingness, correctness); it is distinctive in making central appeal to modal notions, specifically, that of a nearby possible world. The result is a comprehensive framework that captures what is common to and distinctive of reasons of various kinds: justifying and demanding; for and against, possessed and unpossessed; objective and subjective. The framework is then generalized to reasons for belief, that is, to epistemic reasons, and combined with a substantive, first-order commitment, namely, that truth is the sole right-maker for belief. The upshot is an account of the various norms governing belief, including knowledge and rationality, and the relations among them. According to it, the standards to which belief is subject are various, but they are unified by an underlying principle. (shrink)

This book offers an account of Kant's theory of moral motivation that comprehends the most challenging and controversial aspects of Kant's theory of the will and human moral motivational psychology. It argues for a new approach to the question about the purity of the Kantian moral motive.

A reconstruction of F.W.J. Schelling's philosophy of language based on a detailed reading of §73 of Schelling's lectures on the Philosophy of Art.

An enlightening discussion that will motivate students to think critically, the book opens with Plantinga's assertion that Christianity is compatible with evolutionary theory because Christians believe that God created the living world, and it is entirely possible that God did so by using a process of evolution.

In current American medical practice, autonomy is assumed to be more valuable than human life: if a patient autonomously refuses lifesaving treatment, the doctors are supposed to let him die. In this paper we discuss two values that might be at stake in such clinical contexts. Usually, we hear only of autonomy and best interests. However, here, autonomy is ambiguous between two concepts—concepts that are tied to different values and to different philosophical traditions. In some cases, the two values (that (...) of agency and that of authenticity) entail different outcomes. We argue that the comparative value of these values needs to be assessed. (shrink)

Non-Reductive Physicalism is similar in many ways with, what I will call, Orthodox Theism. This strongly suggests that Non-Reductive Physicalist solutions to the Supervenience Argument can be adapted to offer Orthodox Theistic solutions to the Conservation is Continuous Creation Argument. One particular Non-Reductive Physicalist solution will be examined in detail and then applied in the debate over Occasionalism.

I argue that there is a tension between two of the most distinctive theses of Sven Rosenkranz’s Justification as Ignorance: the central thesis concerning justification, according to which an agent has propositional justification to believe p iff they are in no position to know that they are in no position to know p and the desire to avoid logical omniscience by imposing only “realistic” idealizations on epistemic agents.

ABSTRACT Moral hazards are ubiquitous. Green ones typically involve technological fixes: Environmentalists often see ‘technofixes’ as morally fraught because they absolve actors from taking more difficult steps toward systemic solutions. Carbon removal and especially solar geoengineering are only the latest example of such technologies. We here explore green moral hazards throughout American history. We argue that dismissing (solar) geoengineering on moral hazard grounds is often unproductive. Instead, especially those vehemently opposed to the technology should use it as an opportunity to (...) expand the attention paid to the underlying environmental problem in the first place, actively invoking its opposite: ‘inverse moral hazards’. (shrink)

There are two likely paths for philosophers to follow in their encounters with Artificial Life: they can see it as a new way of doing philosophy, or simply as a new object worthy of philosophical attention using traditional methods. Is Artificial Life best seen as a new philosophical method or a new phenomenon? There is a case to be made for each alternative, but I urge philosophers to take the leap and consider the first to be the more important and (...) promising. (shrink)

Are the properties of communicative acts grounded in the intentions with which they are performed, or in the conventions that govern them? The latest round in this debate has been sparked by Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone (2015), who argue that much more of communication is conventional than we thought, and that the rest isn’t really communication after all, but merely the initiation of open-ended imaginative thought. I argue that although Lepore and Stone may be right about many of the (...) specific cases they discuss, their big-picture, conventionalist conclusions don’t follow. My argument focuses on four phenomena that present challenges to conventionalist accounts of communication: ambiguity, indirect communication, communication by wholly unconventional means, and convention acquisition. (shrink)

Recently, a view I refer to as “hypothetical continuism” has garnered some favour among philosophers, based largely on empirical research showing substantial neurocognitive overlaps between episodic memory and imagination. According to this view, episodically remembering past events is the same kind of cognitive process as sensorily imagining future and counterfactual events. In this paper, I first argue that hypothetical continuism is false, on the basis of substantive epistemic asymmetries between episodic memory and the relevant kinds of imagination. However, I then (...) propose and defend an alternative form of continuism, according to which episodic memory is continuous with a capacity I call “actuality-oriented imagination.” Because of the deep epistemic affinities between episodic memory and actuality-oriented imagination, it makes sense to think of them as cognitive processes of the same kind. (shrink)

I present an exemplary Humean modal epistemology. My version takes inspiration from but incurs no commitment to both Hume’s historical position and Lewis’s Humeanism. Modal epistemology should meet two challenges: the Integration challenge of integrating metaphysics and epistemology and the Reliability challenge of giving an account of how our epistemic capacities can be reliable in detecting modal truth. According to Lewis, modal reasoning starts from certain Humean principles: there is only the vast mosaic of spatiotemporally distributed local matters of fact. (...) The facts can be arbitarily recombined. These principles cannot be taken for granted. I suggest a bottom-up approach instead: Humean principles of recombining the mosaic of facts can be retrieved from the evolutionarily instilled and empirically informed use of imagination in exploring everyday circumstantial possibilities. This use of imagination conforms to a primitive conception of matter as freely recombinable. The modal beliefs that can be obtained from generalizing the more elementary exercise of imagination have to be corrected. Recombination is limited by sortal criteria of identity. Moreover, the overall picture of a recombinable spatiotemporal mosaic must be weighed against the results of science. (shrink)

According to the cluster of theories in the metaphysics of properties known as ‘trope’ theories, properties are collections of particular qualitative instances. Though increasingly influential, the cluster is sufficiently diverse for there to be little agreement as to the prospects of its members. The present essay articulates and defends a conception of tropes as primitively qualitatively complex, somewhat in the vein of Quinean nominalist objects. After clarifying the relationships among tropes, properties, property exemplification, and property conferral, the essay discusses the (...) benefits of this new ‘ostrich’ trope theory. Specifically, the theory explains better than prior trope theories both the spatiotemporal status of tropes and the capacity tropes have to confer properties onto objects. Moreover, the theory is immune to many of the concerns that threaten more orthodox trope ontologies. (shrink)

Much has been written about medicine and the market in recent years. This book is the first to include an assessment of market influence in both developed and developing countries, and among the very few that have tried to evaluate the actual health and economic impact of market theory and practices in a wide range of national settings. Tracing the path that market practices have taken from Adam Smith in the eighteenth century into twenty-first-century health care, Daniel Callahan and (...) Angela A. Wasunna add a fresh dimension: they compare the different approaches taken in the market debate by health care economists, conservative market advocates, and liberal supporters of single-payer or government-regulated systems. In addition to laying out the market-versus-government struggle around the world -- from Canada and the United States to Western Europe, Latin America, and many African and Asian countries -- they assess the leading market practices, such as competition, physician incentives, and co-payments, for their economic and health efficacy to determine whether they work as advertised. This timely and necessary book engages new dimensions of a development that has urgent consequences for the delivery of health care worldwide. (shrink)

Mary Midgley's Science and Poetry tackles so many topics of importance that one wants it to be very good. Yet Midgley, a moral philosopher, makes one idea the measure of all things, so that the book is just good enough. Her topic is not really “science and poetry” but the failure of neurobiological reductionism to understand the human mind. That poets understand the mind better than scientists is the subtext of this collection of essays, but the poetic theories Midgley quotes (...) are too general to make much headway against science's prejudices about the arts' naive handling of the serious matters of consciousness, the operation of the brain, and connections between mind and body. Midgley needs to dig deeper into poetry and to provide better analyses of works like Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey” and Shelley's A Defence of Poetry. She also needs to update her poetic references to include contemporaries such as A. R. Ammons, Patti Ann Rodgers, and Alison Deming, who make the science‐based topics that preoccupy Midgley the overt focus of their work. The valuable first section of the book presents capsule histories of science and its march toward dualism, from the Greeks to the Enlightenment, interspersed with poets' contrary views. Midgley succinctly traces the evolution of the theories of the mind/body split that such a campaign produced. She drops the “science and poetry” focus in the second section for her major concern—showing that contemporary scientists themselves, in pursuing scientific understanding, employ choice, intention, and cognition, the very factors denied by strict scientific materialist explanations of how the mind works. This is the neatest feature of the book—its witty turning of scientific discourse about the purely mechanistic operations of the mind back on the scientists themselves, who violate their own theories in stating them. Her favorite scientists to tweak in this way are the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson and the geneticist Richard Dawkins. When she needs to, Midgley lets a philosopher of language like John Searle handle others, such as Daniel Dennett and his claim that cultural ideas are simply genetically produced “memes.” Midgley's summary, however, does not do justice to the complexity of the debate about the nature of language as a window to the operation of the mind. Midgley's strength is in testing fundamental theoretical assumptions by applying common‐sense reasoning to them. For example, Descartes's mind/body dualism fails on the face of it because he uses socially constructed language, a product of mind, as he asserts the complete independence and autonomy of individual minds. Midgley's deft use of simple but revealing thought‐problems also helps make her case, and she is particularly good at alerting us to ordinary words that need clarification, such as “cause.” She's like a poet when she sensitizes us to the power of simple words in shaping scientific discourse. In the miscellaneous last section of the book Midgley provides examples of the contemporary dangers of the reductivist way of thinking, but the first two parts could have used livelier, more pointed dramatizations of the consequences of splitting the world into subjects and objects. Universal human rights and the right of all creatures to live in cooperation are what Midgley believes science ultimately sacrifices in its vision of competitive, reductive materialism. Scientists and social scientists such as Freud and Marx who use that “vision” have led us down disastrous paths. That science should learn to see the world as a cooperating, interacting, and living whole is her wish—and the subject of many of her other books. Science and Poetry would be more effective if condensed into a single, focused essay that concentrated on convincing Midgley's presumed audience—scientists who may have found themselves at the dead end of materialism as their own disciplines discover their limits and branch out into territory more familiar to poets. The book should interest students of literature who want an introduction to the many topics it treats, but they will find little to convince them that poets do indeed have important ideas about the human mind. (shrink)

In You Are What You Do, Daniel Im examines seven everyday lies that Christians believe in the twenty-first century and the gospel truths that reshape everything.

This book brings together eminent scholars from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, literature, and medicine to discuss such provocative issues as "false ...

This book examines the divine nature in terms of maximal greatness. It investigates each attribute associated with maximal greatness - omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness, eternity, and beauty, arguing that maximal greatness is necessary and sufficient for divinity.

IN 1787, six years after the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason, one year before the publication of the Critique of Practical Reason, and three years prior to the appearance of the Critique of Judgment, Duke Karl August of Sax-Weimar was persuaded to establish at the University of Jena the world's first university chair designated for the promulgation and explication of the new Critical Philosophy associated with Immanuel Kant. The first occupant of this chair was Karl Leonhard Reinhold, an (...) Austrian ex-monk, whose main qualification for the new position was his fame as the author of a series of well-received magazine articles promoting the new philosophy. At Jena, however, Reinhold's own "Kantianism" underwent an interesting metamorphosis; in the books and lectures that he wrote during his seven year tenure there he profoundly revised the Kantian system and produced a new version of it which he called "Elementary Philosophy." It is altogether appropriate that when Reinhold finally left Jena his successor should have been an even more innovative follower of Kant and admirer of Reinhold's Elementary Philosophy, J. G. Fichte. Fichte arrived in 1794 and immediately began constructing and laying before the public what is perhaps the most imaginative and remarkable of all the great post-Kantian speculative systems: his Wissenschaftslehre, or "Theory of Scientific Knowledge." Concurrent with the widespread revival of interest in German Idealism generally, interest in Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre has increased remarkably in recent years. Often viewed as the first step "from Kant to Hegel," Fichte's system was in fact not the first attempt to convert Kant's philosophy into a more consistent and thoroughgoingly speculative system. The honor--or onus--of making the "first step" in this direction belongs to Reinhold, and the aim of this essay is to indicate why this is so by surveying the Elementary Philosophy and examining those of its features which most influenced other philosophers, most notably Fichte. Though it may be claiming too much to say that one cannot properly understand Fichte's early presentations of his system without some acquaintance with Reinhold's Elementary Philosophy, it is certainly true that a familiarity with the latter is a tremendous aid to anyone trying to penetrate the former. Though the chief purpose of this survey is to emphasize Reinhold's contributions to the development of German Idealism, an ulterior aim is to introduce contemporary readers, especially English-language readers, to Reinhold's Elementary Philosophy and to suggest reasons why this neglected and all but forgotten system might still merit serious study. (shrink)

The primary claim of this paper is that intellectual conflicts of interest (COIs) exist but are of lower ethical priority than COIs flowing from relationships between health professionals and commercial industry characterized by financial exchange. The paper begins by defining intellectual COIs and framing them in the context of scholarship on non-financial COIs. However, the paper explains that the crucial distinction is not between financial and non-financial COIs but is rather between motivations for bias that flow from relationships and those (...) that do not. While commitments to particular ideas or perspectives can cause all manner of cognitive bias, that fact does not justify denying the enormous power that relationships featuring pecuniary gain have on professional behaviour in term of care, policy, or both. Sufficient reason exists to take both intellectual COIs and financial COIs seriously, but this paper demonstrates why the latter is of higher ethical priority. Multiple reasons will be provided, but the primary rationale grounding the claim is that intellectual COIs may provide reasons to suspect cognitive bias but they do not typically involve a loss of trust in a social role. The same cannot be said for COIs flowing from relationships between health professionals and commercial industries involving financial exchange. The paper then assumes arguendo that the primary rationale is mistaken and proceeds to show why the claims that intellectual COIs are more significant than relationship-based COIs are dubious on their own merits. The final section of the paper summarizes and concludes. (shrink)

Since the 1970s, a sea change has marked the politics of science in the United States. In the quarter century after World War II, a broad, bipartisan consensus prevailed on the promotion and uses of science in American society: first, that the federal government should support research and training in technically meritorious fields of likely long-term benefit to national defense, the economy, and health; second, that the benefits of this investment should be developed into useful products by the private sector; (...) and that public policy in technically related areas should be shaped by drawing on highly qualified, non-partisan expertise. Since the 1970s, that bipartisan consensus has corroded, ushering in a New Politics of Science in the U.S. Ideological restrictions, largely from the political right, have prohibited or severely constricted federal support of research in areas such as human therapeutic cloning, human stem cells, in vitro fertilization, and human embryo research. The devotion to privatization and entrepreneurship in the name of high technology competitiveness has, in areas such as biotechnology, blurred the lines both intellectually and institutionally between academia and industry, with questionable consequences for the public interest. And nonpartisanship in the scientific advisory system has been succeeded by unashamed partisanship, fueled by the mobilization of expertise on the right in issues ranging from the teaching of evolution in the schools to global warming. The reasons for this sea change can be found in the larger rightward shift over the period on both the foreign and domestic fronts. (shrink)

While solid organ transplantation for patients with substance use issues has attracted ethical discussion, a typology of the ethics themes has not been articulated in the literature. We conducted a scoping review of peer-reviewed literature on solid organ transplantation and substance use published between January 1997 and April 2016. We aimed to identify and develop a typology of the main ethical themes discussed in this literature and to identify gaps worthy of future research. Seventy articles met inclusion criteria and underwent (...) inductive content analysis. Four main ethical themes were identified: (1) personal responsibility; (2) utility; (3) moral character; and (4) fairness. Each theme had multiple sub-themes and there was substantial overlap between themes. This scoping review identified a disproportionate emphasis in the literature regarding personal responsibility, which was referenced by each of the other themes, and a narrow focus on alcohol and liver. We recommend future research further investigate these connections between ethical themes and focus on ethical issues associated with transplants from organ groups other than liver for patients who use substances other than alcohol. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to examine Francis Glisson’s theory of perception insofar as it concerns the lowest class of living beings: plants. Plants have a special status, they are located between inanimate objects and animals in the hierarchy of being. Unlike the former, they are organic, but unlike the latter they are unconscious. Peculiar to Glisson is the claim that vegetative organization requires self-referential perception. In light of traditional epistemology, this claim may sound puzzling, because we tend to (...) associate self-representation with conscious thought. In order to make sense of Glisson’s self-referential, but unconscious perceptions, the first part of the paper investigates the role of perception in the vegetative process of organization. The second part is a comparative study on two ways of drawing the distinction between unconscious perceptions and conscious sensations. The first one is the Cartesian approach as outlined by Antoine Arnauld in the early 1680s, the second one is Glisson’s theory. In light of the comparison it is argued that Glisson’s is a higher order theory of sensation in which the phenomenon of consciousness requires the delimitation of the all-inclusive, self-referential nature of perception. (shrink)

The authors examined how a perceiver’s identification of a target person’s actions covaries with attributions of mind to the target. The authors found in Study 1 that the attribution of intentionality and cognition to a target was associated with identifying the target’s action in terms of high-level effects rather than low-level details. In Study 2, both action identification and mind attribution were greater for a liked target, and in Study 3, they were reduced for a target suffering misfortune. In Study (...) 4, it was again found that action identification and mind attribution were greater for a liked target, but like that for the self or a liked other, positive actions were identified at higher levels than negative actions, with the reverse being true for disliked others. In Study 5, the authors found that instructing participants to adopt the target’s perspective did not affect mind attribution but did lead to higher level identifications of the.. (shrink)